AI Content Generation
What this article covers: Category metafields are the structured data that lets Shopify Search and Discovery filter your products by attributes like colour, size, material, and age group. This article explains how Importier fills them in automatically and what to do if an Industry Pack is not installed.

Category Metafields (Taxonomy Attributes)

Automatically match products to Shopify taxonomy attributes like Colour, Material, Size, and Age Group.

Prerequisites

  1. Industry Packs installed in Settings. See Industry Packs for the full list of 22 packs covering 3,758 attribute types.
  2. Products with a Category ID assigned (from Enrichment or CSV).

How Matching Works

Phase 0: Direct Match. Matches variant option names directly to category attributes. For example, your "Color" column maps to Shopify's Colour attribute, with values like "Black" or "Navy".

Phase 1: Deterministic Match. Handles high-confidence cases such as parenthetical abbreviations ("L" becomes "Large (L)").

Phase 2: AI Match. For ambiguous remaining attributes, AI selects from Shopify's exact taxonomy values.

Reliable Colour Matching

The Color attribute now imports reliably across categories. If an older import was missing colour values, re-importing the affected products now picks them up.

The "Industry Pack not installed" warning

If a category metafield cannot be written because the relevant Industry Pack is not enabled on your store, Importier shows a warning on the Import Complete page. The product still imports; only the metafield write is skipped. Follow the one-click guidance to enable the pack via Shopify's settings.

Post-Import Warning Detail

The post-import warning now lists every skipped category attribute with its specific reason, so you can see at a glance which Industry Pack to enable or which value is missing rather than guessing.

Values not in Shopify's Taxonomy

If a value does not exist in Shopify's taxonomy for the attribute, Importier leaves the field blank rather than picking a near match. Set the value yourself using the Specification columns in the Review step. See Manual Specification Assignment.

Combined attribute types

Some attributes are stored together by Shopify (for example, Colour and Pattern share shopify--color-pattern). Importier handles these automatically.

Overriding metafield values

Click into the Category Metafield column dropdowns in the Review Import Table to pick a different value, or leave a value blank to skip writing that specific metafield.

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